YouTuber Raps About the Illusion of Free Will As Commentary to Call of Duty Video Game

YouTuber CamperKillerCommentary has released a video in which he raps about scientific experiments that cast doubt on the existence of free will over footage of him – I assume it’s him – playing the popular first-person shooter Call of Duty. And no, I haven’t the foggiest clue how all of this fits together. Apparently it’s the 26th in a series.

12 Commentson "YouTuber Raps About the Illusion of Free Will As Commentary to Call of Duty Video Game"

You know, I’m loathe to admit that someone else has a point that didn’t originate in my own philosophy, but Chris Hedges’ objection to atheism must be addressed:

Without a sense of transcendence, the human is essentially reduced to slavery, as an object to be performed upon rather than an active moral agent in him or herself.

Hedges is quite candid about the abuse of religion in the political arena. Nothing that Tocqueville hadn’t anticipated in 1830, really. But to date nobody has been able to convincingly imagine a cohesive society without some respect for the transcendant. If nobody has free will, the very notion of intention becomes an absurdity; an invitation to madness.

You might be interested in reading Mary Midgley’s work. She is a much more eloquent and lucid philosopher than Chris Hedges, and she took on Dawkins while Hedges was still a reporter. I highly recommend Evolution as a Religion and The Ethical Primate.

maybe it’s just a lack of honesty…I like red because it’s the color you’ll bleed when I stick you with my favorite knife…why is it my favorite knife? You should care about BANDAGES not why I chose that knife so I can see my favorite color. And if this post smacks of insane and inane reason, I am just following suit. Werd.

Actually, we have the potential for free will, but few people actually exercise it, want to exercise it, or even really know how. It takes practice, effort, and honest self-examination, but it is possible. Unfortunately, few people care to do the work, and let outside influences (eg: “authority” figures, nasally self-styled rappers, etc.) and their own lower impulses do their thinking and make their decisions for them.

OOOh, the unconscious is aware of the decision before the conscious? Ok…

So perhaps free will originates elsewhere that in the conscious mind, and the conscious mind only executes the command? So unless we access the unconscious, we remain unaware of the reasons behind the decision, but that doesn’t mean that we are deterministic machines.

This sort of view is again only valid if you accept that the brain is the origin of consciousness. What “findings” are spoken of here don’t proove anything unless you start from the presomption that consciousness is local phenomena with the brain as it’s origin. The problem here is that there is no such proof that consciouness is local. Only conjecture, presented as science.

Science, as we know it, doesn’t posess the means to prove anything regarding consciousness. To paraphrase Graham Hancock, observing the TV doing something doesn’t mean the TV is the origin of the shows. They know nothing as to what the unconscious is, but hey, wouldn’t just accept that you’re a machine? Please? What hubris, what arrogance it is to think that they know where my thoughts come from. Seing my brain process those thoughts doesn’t mean they came from the brain.

Correlation seems oddly difficult to differentiate from causation for people calling themselves scientist. Reductionist in particular seem to have failed that course.

Very cogent argument made by both if you. I still have a problem with Harris’s arguments about free will. It’s as if (and this may seem rather simplistic, but I am no philosopher or neuro scientist), because the decisions are made subconsciously, we are not making them. But our subconscious, barring any real proof that it or consciousness exists and of course basing all of this on a lot of assumptions that science cannot sort out for us right now (is consciousness real, what is it etc.), would still seem to be a part of us, just not a part we are aware of or in control of at any given time. I think his argument would be better served if he stated, there is no such thing as us being aware of our free will, that that is actually the delusion or the illusion or a sort. Because if we are making the decisions milliseconds before we are ‘perceiving’ our conscious mind as the part of us that is actually making the decision, at the nd of the day some part of us is making the decision. It comes down to us not being cognizant of what part of us is making this decision, and that is probably a whole field of study unto itself that has yet to be tapped I’m guessing.

“Free Will” as it relates to the “Fight or Flight Response” in the human mind is unique in that humans are able to deny that response through higher cognitive functions. So, in that sense Free Will is very real and something we all (at least I would hope) can express, not that we always express it.

This video raises a whole lot of other questions though. The first one being… WTF?